Hard Truths

 There's a poem that I much admire by Bertolt Brecht entitled "The Mask of Evil."  In the poem, Brecht describes a Japanese mask hanging on his wall.  The poet notes that the swollen veins depicted in the demon's forehead demonstrate "wie anstrengend es ist, boes zu sein"  ("how strenuous or exhausting it is to be evil.")  This sentiment informs Mike Leigh's Hard Truths (2025).  I must first identify a "hard truth" about this intellectually challenging movie:  we need to call a spade a spade -- the film's protagonist. Pansy, is "evil"; her bitterness, cruelty, and paranoid suspiciousness have damaged everyone around her and made living with her a sort of hell. It won't do to look away from what is obvious and claim that Pansy is a victim of some kind or misunderstood -- the protagonist, from the first time we see her until the film's last frame, uses her eloquence and high intelligence to systematically vilify and harm everyone in her family as well as random strangers that she encounters.  She is actively wicked and destructive; her panicked grimaces and entire demeanor demonstrate how strenuous it is to be so bad.  Leigh's achievement is to present this character in such a way that she earns a small measure of our respect for her articulate rage, often quite funny (it's possible, I think, to admire Iago for his deviousness and intelligence); further, Leigh even induces in moviegoers a sort of sympathy for the monstrous character that he presents to us so directly and with so little editorial comment.

The milieu in Hard Truths is a middle-class neighborhood, a London suburb that is inhabited by West Indian immigrants, albeit all second or third generation.  Everyone is Black -- there is a single White figure in the movie, a hapless female "sales associate" in a furniture shop whom Pansy viciously berates.  Pansy's husband, Cortly runs a plumbing business with a loquacious cheerful laborer named Virgil.  (It's an odd coincidence but the setting in Hard Truths almost exactly mirrors the situation in Adolescence, another notable British picture -- the family in Adolescence also lives in a comfortable, if crowded-looking London suburb and the father in that show is also a plumber; the only difference is that the people in Hard Truths are Black and those in Adolescence White.)  Pansy and Cortly have one son, Moses, a hulking child-man (he is 25) who spends his time sullenly walking around town or holed-up in his room reading books about airplanes -- obviously, he wants to escape from the hellish family life in which he is the victim of his mother's constant bullying.  If anything, Cortly has it even worse.  By the end of the movie, he's been physically wounded to the point that he can't even move.  Pansy's mother, Pearl has been dead for five years.  Pansy's sister, an ebullient and humorous beautician, has many friends and two successful daughters -- one is a lawyer; the other works in marketing for beauty products company.  Pansy is the elder sister and utterly different from her cheerful, generous sibling whose name is Chantelle.  (There is a charming scene set in Chantelle's hair salon in which the women converse about their lives in a lilting creole patois.)  There's next to no plot.  Pansy wakes in the morning with scream.  Everything frightens her because everything is an enemy.  She hates and fears the "filthy" pigeons that occupy her backyard.  She greets her husband and poor Moses with an uninterrupted rant consisting of insults and assertions that she is a victim.  When she goes to the doctor, she abuses the young female physician.  At the dentist, she bullies the hygienist.  At the grocery store, and in a parking lot, she gets into screaming exchanges with casual strangers.  She is hysterically fearful of birds, plants, and insects.  Pansy has a sharp tongue and her diatribes are often darkly comical, but it's obvious that she has committed soul-murder with respect to the longsuffering Cortly and her hapless son, Moses.  When she refuses to cook supper, Cortly goes out and gets the equivalent of Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat with Moses -- Pansy bellows at him about the smell of the chicken and demands that windows be opened the aerate their home; when a fox finds itself trapped in her backyard, she reacts with rage, acting as if the animal has been dispatched to personally offend and terrify her.  The story is limited to Chantelle asking Pansy to go with her to the cemetery on Mother's Day to visit Pearl's grave.  Chantelle has planned a family meal after the visit to the cemetery.  At the graveyard, the two sisters quarrel and Pansy says that when their father abandoned Pearl, she had to raise Chantelle and, therefore, was deprived of her own life.  (None of her explanations as to why she is so wrathful have even the slightest patina of plausibility).  The family dinner predictably degenerates when Pansy attacks everyone in the room. Someone mentions that Moses purchased a bouquet of flowers for his mother; this comment causes Pansy to laugh uncontrollably, a sort of satanic seizure and, then, burst into inconsolable tears.  (She cries out that she is "so tired" and "so lonely.') When Cortly doesn't respond to a question posed by the kindly Chantelle about his own mother (the poor man seems distracted), Pansy reacts violently and, at home, dumps all of Cortly's possessions in the hall and expels him from the bedroom.  Cruelty is contagious.  Pansy has put Moses' flowers in a vase, touching the cut plants as if they were rotting bones or a serpent.  Cortly sees the flowers in the vase and coldly picks them up and hurls them into the backyard -- this is one of the most chilling moments in the movie, demonstrating the maxim that those to whom cruelty is done become cruel themselves.  Cortly and Virgil are shown lugging a porcelain bathtub down some stairs.  In the process, Cortly hurts his back badly.  We see him in agony at home, scarcely able to move, understanding full well that Pansy will do nothing to help him.  Moses goes for another long walk (thugs often bully him) and, maybe, meets a friendly girl.  The last sequence consists of big close-ups of Cortly and Pansy in an impasse, unable to even speak to one another.  

The film is partly improvised and has very sharp, penetrating dialogue.  Marianne Jean Baptiste plays Pansy -- she worked earlier for Mike Leigh in Secrets and Lies and her performance is relentless and uncompromising.  Of course, we keep expecting to see some trace of kindness or, at least, humanity in Pansy, but this is denied to us.  At no point in the ninety minute movie does she act with even a modicum of human decency.  Of course, the question that the movie poses is a simple, if imponderable one:  why is Pansy like this?  No explanations are offered.  We wonder if she was abused as a child or the victim of racism or some other social forces.  But there is no evidence that any of this explains Pansy's malevolence.  The film is similar to Leigh's great Naked in that no attempt is made to provide a basis for the character's bizarre behavior.  I recall the great quotation from Richard III in Runaway Train:  "No beast so fierce but knows the touch of pity, but I know none and, therefore, am no beast."  Pansy's humanity consists exactly in her obdurate, enduring hatred.  

The film is eloquently, if simply, shot, by Dick Pope, Mike Leigh's longtime cameraman.  There are extraneous aspects to the film that are so underdeveloped that they don't contribute to the picture -- these are vestigial subplots involving Chantelle's two attractive and successful daughters that are intended to be vaguely satirical.  These short sequences are okay but don't add anything to the movie.  In some ways, the picture resembles another masterpiece by Mike Leigh, Life is Sweet about a young woman with an eating disorder (in the context of grotesque efforts by Timothy Spall to start a gourmet restaurant) -- Jim Broadbent appears in that film, another familiar actor in Leigh's work.  Leigh, who is 82, has made fifteen pictures, many of them very great including Topsy-Turvy, one of the best period pictures ever produced.  Hard Truths, further, inverts the situation in Happy-go-Lucky involving a woman who is preternaturally kind and happy. Hard Truths is an important work by a major filmmaker, utterly clear and lucid, but remarkably resistant to interpretation.